Catholic integralism has enjoyed a small renaissance on the right in recent years, taken up by prominent apologists like Adrian Vermeule, a law professor at Harvard, and Sohrab Ahmari, the op-ed editor at the New York Post.

[In this connection, a] sort of authoritarian tourism [is emerging among] a new generation of right-wingers who, alienated from the secular liberalism of America, are attracted to illiberal alternatives. The same impulses that took [Brent Bozell] to Franco’s Spain now attract the Tucker Carlsons and Rod Drehers of the world to Orbán’s Hungary. Theorists like Vermeule and Ahmari might dream of a Christian commonwealth, but Orbán is showing how it is actually done, providing a real world model to emulate…

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Afghanistan’s caliphate will no doubt be Vermeule and company’s next stop on the authoritarian theocracy tourist trail. Excise Mohammed and you’re in the same spiritual universe, with a close to identical social ethos. Mawlawi Hibatullah Akhundzada, with his global ambitions, is a far better tourist attraction than provincial Orbán, for while integralist Hungary contents itself with its iota of irrelevant territory, Akhundzada is just getting started.

Mona Eltahawy’s crucial cover essay for Foreign Policy (2012) needs rereading as an important corrective to the wishful thinking we’re starting to hear about prospects for women in Taliban Afghanistan.

“Name me an Arab country, and I’ll recite a litany of abuses fueled by a toxic mix of culture and religion that few seem willing or able to disentangle lest they blaspheme or offend. When more than 90 percent of ever-married women in Egypt — including my mother and all but one of her six sisters — have had their genitals cut in the name of modesty, then surely we must all blaspheme. When Egyptian women are subjected to humiliating ‘virginity tests’ merely for speaking out, it’s no time for silence. When an article in the Egyptian criminal code says that if a woman has been beaten by her husband “with good intentions” no punitive damages can be obtained, then to hell with political correctness…

Not a single Arab country ranks in the top 100 in the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report, putting the region as a whole solidly at the planet’s rock bottom. Poor or rich, we all hate our women…

Attempts to control by such regimes often stem from the suspicion that without it, a woman is just a few degrees short of sexual insatiability…

[W]omen are silenced by a deadly combination of men who hate them while also claiming to have God firmly on their side… The Islamist hatred of women burns brightly across the region — now more than ever…

The hatred of women goes deep in Egyptian society. Those of us who have marched and protested have had to navigate a minefield of sexual assaults by both the regime and its lackeys, and, sadly, at times by our fellow revolutionaries…”

And that was the Arab Spring, baby! Fasten your seat belt for the Ice Age.

A school that lionizes national conflict of interest icon Charles Nemeroff also thinks nothing of lionizing seedy nursing home mogul Morris Esformes…

Morris’s overwhelming preoccupation for many years has been keeping his son, Philip, out of prison for having run with the whole seedy nursing home thing and turned it into the largest health care fraud in American history.

Philip, when not taking all of the federal government’s money, was himself long preoccupied with bribing the head basketball coach at the University of Pennsylvania to put Philip’s son – named Morris after Family Crook #1 – on the team, and thereby grant his admission to that Ivy League institution.

Head-spinning, ain’t it? Flamboyantly pious religious people, too — all of them. But maintain your focus! I’m trying to update you on all of this.

So Philip got twenty years but because of a ton of flamboyantly pious friends he got DJT to pardon him! Largest health care fraud ever MEH.

But not so fast! For some reason the feds would prefer that its expensive, protracted, extremely difficult fight to put Philip in prison NOT be blithely overturned by rich corrupt people. Athough Philip has indeed been released, the Justice Department “will pursue unresolved charges from Esformes’ healthcare fraud trial in 2019.” And since there were like three million original charges against the guy, the feds have a full plate of leftovers from which to choose. He will soon go to trial again, and because the man of God is guilty as hell, he’ll soon be back in prison, and it’ll be Arrested Development all over again.

The other University of Miami medical school story? Ne quittez pas.

“All of our European sisters rallying in support of veiling are right!” exulted one young woman eyeing the onward march of the Taliban. “I can’t wait for total covering — modesty’s the ticket! Allah’s gonna love it!”

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UD devoutly hopes that watching vibrant living beings die under the vile shroud that is the burqa will strengthen Europe’s (most of Europe’s) determination to ban it among its citizens. Together, footage from ISIS prisoner camps and from pious perverted Afghanistan should be more than enough to silence the fools defending the invisibility cloak.

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Today’s [American] college students are too young to remember the utter shock of seeing a country of women wearing burqas, head-to-toe coverings with small patches of mesh in the eye area. Women who looked all the same, women who were completely hidden, women unable to see except barely and straight ahead.

It was a nightmare.

Tsk. How judgmental. How culturally non-relativist. USA Today’s opinion writer just comes right out with her Islamophobia, and this must be because she has failed to read the right books and attend the right rallies. A nightmare? Oh no. No, you can’t say that. The burqa is a beautiful expression of the piety of Muslim women. Now all Afghan women will be beautiful in the sight of God.

But come now. This is hardly peak criticism. Religious fanaticism can take you much farther. They haven’t even started in on the kool-aid yet.

Well, let’s not overstate the matter. They’re taught to hate a lot of people who are Jewish, too.

Had to laugh when I read this, although the story of Aminah’s mother (my friend Peter rescued eight year old Aminah from an ISIS prisoner camp a few weeks ago – details here), who was killed in an attack on ISIS, is deeply sad. Home non-schooled by a fervent speaker in tongues (think Carrie; details here), Ariel Bradley escaped a nightmare mother only to become – after a twisted ideological journey – an even worse religious fanatic.

Can it be that if Aminah is repatriated she’ll have to live with Ariel’s mother? Will Aminah never live in a sane world?

Read it all. It’s short.

The Cathophate to come! So much to love.

Defrocked and living in St Louis, McCarrick now faces a criminal charge.

Fond memories of the man here.

White evangelicals represent by far the most vaccine-resistant group in the nation; they constitute America’s current greatest health crisis.

At 412 Murrieta, an evangelical church in Riverside County, southeast of Los Angeles, Pastor Tim Thompson has frequently preached against the vaccines and brought in guest speakers who do the same.

“This is not a vaccination…it’s unclean,” he said during a spring sermon, making a reference to biblical principles of purity and health.

No one knows how to solve this, and meanwhile the evangelicals are taking us all down with them.

UD proposes the following. Summon Pastor Tim to a spectacularly appointed boardroom in midtown Manhattan, where Richard Dawkins (atheist vaccination rate: 90% – highest in the country), following Ned Beatty in this famous scene, will convince Tim that he, Dawkins, is in fact God, and has chosen Tim Thompson from among all men to preach the gospel of uncleanliness. If this works, Dawkins can move on to all the other anti-vax pastors.

Ah, fuggedaboutit. Let’s follow another story.

Renowned for his successful defense of a career genital mutilator in Michigan, Dershowitz should have no trouble successfully defending an Israeli burial society that barred a family from their father’s/husband’s funeral because some of the people who wanted to bury him were women.

Talia, Omer, and Stav’s father passed away four months ago. When they arrived at the cemetery to say their final goodbyes to their father, they were barred from participating equally in the funeral. The local hevra kadisha – burial society – wouldn’t let the family eulogize their father. When a representative of the hevra kadisha tore their brother’s shirt as a sign of mourning, the daughters were told to do it later, at home. And when it came time for the funeral procession, Talia, Omer,  Stav, and their mother were warned to remain behind and not follow their father’s body to the graveside. They ignored the warning and were met with yelling: “Women move aside!”, “Don’t mix women and men!”, and “Women shouldn’t be here!”

The sisters felt that their chance to say goodbye to their father was ruined. They turned to us, and last week we filed a lawsuit against the town in which the funeral was held demanding 268,496 NIS (approx. $76,000) in damages for preventing Talia, Omer, Stav, and their mother from participating in their father’s funeral. 

... It is illegal to force gender segregation or exclude women from … funeral procession[s] … [B]urial societies must not impose segregation unless the family requests it.

The proposed Israeli government plan to break the state’s monopoly on kosher [food] certification will not only harm religious standards but also lead to an increase in sexual immorality, Sephardi Chief Rabbi Yitzhak Yosef declared last week.

Private certifiers of kashrut, Yosef claimed, could use female inspectors, leading to “licentiousness and a lack of modesty,” according to the ultra-Orthodox Hebrew-language website Kikar Hashabbat.

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[Jorgen Lovberg’s] first produced work, brought to the stage when he was sixty-one, was Those Who Squirm, which drew mixed notices from the critics, although the frankness of the subject matter (cheese fondling) caused conservative audiences to blush.

“Years ago I wrote a book about cosmology, and near the end I tried to summarize the view of the expanding universe and the laws of nature. And I made the remark – I guess I was foolish enough to make the remark – that the more the universe seems comprehensible the more it seems pointless. And that remark has been quoted more than anything else I’ve ever said. It’s even in Bartlett’s Quotations. I think it’s been the truth in the past that it was widely hoped that by studying nature we will find the sign of a grand plan, in which human beings play a particularly distinguished starring role. And that has not happened. I think that more and more the picture of nature, the outside world, has been one of an impersonal world governed by mathematical laws that are not particularly concerned with human beings, in which human beings appear as a chance phenomenon, not the goal toward which the universe is directed…

I believe that what we have found so far, an impersonal universe in which it is not particularly directed toward human beings, is what we are going to continue to find. And that when we find the ultimate laws of nature they will have a chilling, cold impersonal quality about them…

Science cannot give us what religion gives those who believe in it. Science can’t give us the consolation of knowing that when we die we are going to continue in some sense to exist. It leaves us with a much bleaker view of our own future…

I think in many respects religion is a dream – a beautiful dream often. Often a nightmare. But it’s a dream from which I think it’s about time we awoke…”

Saudi Arabia Ends Male Guardian Requirement for Women Attending Hajj